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Comment by jnoller | Hacker News Reader

Ugh. Google entering this pretty much wipes out the space - companies like bit.ly are going to need to work on seriously differentiating themselves from the pack, and even then I don't think they're long for the world.

I can honestly say I hope to never be in a market - or working on a product - where google suddenly decides to enter the game. Even if their offering sucks, or is broken, it sucks all the air out of the room because it's OMG Google.

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I don't think anyone really believed that something you can hack together in twenty minutes, where your business plan is completely based on "for as long as Twitter doesn't do one", really counts as a "space". Anyone who invested in it deserved to get burned.

bit.ly were working on partnerships with publishers as their means of getting some monetization, but that's all I've really seen.

I'd prefer the Google one to the others, because at least I have some guarantee that the Google one won't go away.

Like Wave didn't go away?

To be fair, Wave is still functional and Google announced intentions of releasing "Wave in a Box" (1). And they have explicitly said they'll provide a method to export existing data. Either way, their decommissioning of Wave is a lot more responsible than, say, what Xmarks is doing. I trust Google a lot more than a fly-by-night startup to gracefully shutdown their services.

(1) http://googlewavedev.blogspot.com/2010/09/wave-open-source-n...

where your business plan is completely based on "for as long as Twitter doesn't do one"

From what I could tell from the last emails sent from twitter, they are doing one. I wrote a very short blog-post on that since I was surprised nobody else seemed to notice:

http://jostein.kjonigsen.net/articles/166/Twitter_finally_ki...

What historical evidence is there for this? In every case I can think of in which a Google product supplanted an established competitor, it's been pretty clear that it did so through merit. As a converse example, I don't see Google Finance establishing any obvious position of dominance. Google has had no lack of failed products.

I rarely use shorteners, so excuse my ignorance here, but what does Google offer here that bit.ly doesn't? Why would I switch to Google after using bit.ly for a long time?

One nice thing is that goo.gl is pretty fast. See the link at http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/17/url-shorteners-speed/ for a graph from a few months ago, for example. We're also shooting for great uptime and we have a bunch of malware checks when shortening urls.

Have you checked out Bit.ly recently? They have differentiated themselves quite nicely -- they offer URL shortening for custom domains. I don't know if that can keep them afloat, but it's certainly a cool idea.

Right now it looks like the companies are neck and neck. Each offering a 6 character prefix for urls. bit.ly good invest in R and D and try to get that number down a bit.

Private link analytics vs. public.

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